“Physics envy” – physics abysmally misconstrued!

All things are subject to interpretation.
Whichever interpretation prevails at a given
time is a function of power and not truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I SWITCHED from
physics to marketing in 1988, after two decades of freelancing as a copywriter.
I found myself in the chair of marketing director at the Moscow office of a
Western blue-chip company. As is common in physics, I plunged into the marketing
literature absolutely sure that I would acquire knowledge that would enable me
to handle singular marketing problems in the then USSR. My naïveté came from the fact that nearly any piece of knowledge in physics can
immediately be employed in the laboratory.

I was in for a shock – having devoured a
dozen of marketing tomes (Oh, God, how thick they appeared to be – twice the
size of an average physics book). I found just a chaotic heap of useless,
contradictory schemes, visualizations, matrices, models, classifications,
definitions, dogmas, etc., etc., etc.

At first I honestly tried to apply some
of that stuff in my work, only to discover quite soon that it was of no
practical use whatsoever. And so, I had to progress by trial and error. I pride
myself in having nearly quadrupled the bottom line within 3.5 years.

You can imagine my surprise when years
later I discovered that the infernal chaos in academic marketing texts and minds
is caused by the so-called “physics envy,” a term coined by the British
researcher Alan Tapp [1]. That envy came from the desire of scholars in new
social university disciplines to establish their intellectual credentials. Tapp
called it “a form of mild paranoia.”

Tapp talks about physics’ “undue and
malign influence within universities.” But the culprit is not physics per se
but rather academia’s abysmal misunderstanding of the philosophy and practice of
physical research, the ways it uses mathematics, plans experiments, etc.

Having failed to internalize all this,
marketing academics now practice thoughtless mimicry of the external trappings
of physics. They go overboard to make academic marketing look scientific, but
end up with what the British marketer Andrew Ehrenberg christened
“Scientification of Non-Knowledge” (SONK). It is this mimicry and SONK-ing that
are responsible for the total disaster of academic marketing.

Tapp rightly maintains that “physics envy could have a positive outcome.” But
for that to occur, academia must take the trouble to embrace the true values and
approaches of physics.

Why do physicists account for a sizeable
proportion of Nobel laureates in non-physics disciplines? Because in a physics
classroom people acquire a whole lot of useful assets and habits, e.g., real
scientific rigor in definitions, models, techniques, and analysis, which help
them along enormously.

Says James Heckman, Nobel Laureate,
Economics, 2000: “Under his [Oppenheimer] guidance, I learned the beauty of
experimental science and the pleasure of matching theory to evidence. Although I
later abandoned physics for economics, my enthusiasm for scientific empirical
work guided by theory was born in his classroom.” In other words, when
physicists abandon physics, most of them continue to think and feel like
physicists and remain sticklers for physics-style rigor in their reasoning or
whatever.

Physics vs. academic marketing

I will try to look at some features of
physics and how they relate to those of academic marketing. After that I will do
the same for cliento-marketing.

Theory and practice

Physics is generally divided into
fundamental and applied branches. They are intertwined and linked with
practice. Edward Teller said: “The science of today is the technology of
tomorrow.” Lay people are not interested in scientific detail; but they welcome
the benefits they receive from discoveries of physicists. In 2007, the Nobel
Prize in physics was awarded for the discovery of “giant magnetostriction.” Not
many laymen understood that phenomenon. But everybody liked the net result – a
dramatic increase in the capacity of electronic storage devices.

Engineering practitioners, especially in
high technologies, are voracious readers of journals on fundamental and applied
physics and other sciences. They search for ideas to be incorporated into new
products.

In academic marketing
– Practitioners ignore the results of academic “research.” Academic marketing
journals are only read by library mice… and other academics [2], [3], [4].

Honesty

Ludwig Feuerbach put it: “Love of
science is love of truth; therefore honesty is the principal virtue of a
scientist.” A dishonest scientist will sooner or later let himself go to garbles
and lies, and find himself among pseudo-scientists. In his paper “Cargo Cult
Science” [5] the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman writes: “If
you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might
make it invalid… If you make a theory,… you must also put down all the facts
that disagree with it.”

Says Robert Ehrlich: “True scientist does not merely seek evidence for a
hypothesis, but looks even harder for evidence against it. Moreover, they resort
neither to tinkering with the theory (introducing a “fudge factor”) or making ad
hoc adjustments to the data to get the two to match” [6].

A true scientist always doubts.

In academic marketing
– SONK-ists are inherently dishonest. They have no boring habit to honestly cite
cases that do not fit into their constructs, in blithe disregard of the fact
that in marketing there are a multitude of mutually exclusive situations.

Sometimes they even condescend to
outright lies. A mailing was sent to members of the Market Research Society of
Australia asking them which techniques they (a) were aware of and (b) used.
Along with Chi Square, multi-dimensional scaling, etc., the phantom
“Scranton’s Capper” was inserted. Something like 30% of all researchers
claimed to have heard of it and about 13% claimed to have used it.

Scientific dishonesty gives rise to
academic hypocrisy – think one thing, say another. Peter November confides:
“What I say to PhD students is: don’t rock the boat, comply with the paradigm.
You will not get through if you try to be different” [2]. (Really, “Hypocrisy,
Thy Name Is Academe” (W. McElroy) [7].) Post-Soviets are all too well
acquainted with that. One of Soviet jokes – I do have my own opinion, but I
disagree with it.

Not to be different means to think like
everyone else. The US general George Patton said: “If everyone is thinking
alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”

What percentage of the academe are not
thinking?

Proofs, checks, and tests

Feynman goes on to say: “During the
Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas. Then a method was discovered
for separating the ideas – which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it
didn’t work, to eliminate it. This method became organized into science.”

Thus, science owes its very birth
precisely to trying, or rather to proving. Everything unproven is just a
scientific hypothesis awaiting its proof; or an idle speculation, or an utter
nonsense, or pseudo-science.

Physics is not interested in any
results; it is only interested in faithful, hard-and-fast results. Some
studies are re-tested many times over by different laboratories. In physics
nobody would take you seriously unless you substantiate thoroughly your
theoretical model with all its simplifications and assumptions. Nobody would
publish your experimental findings unless you (a) show that your experiment was
conducted extremely correctly and carefully, and (b) assess the experimental
errors properly. In a paper, a busy physicist first goes for the rationale of
the model and techniques employed. If unhappy with them, he may not read any
further.

In academic marketing
– One has to prove only one thing: a possibility to get extra profit due to a
given idea. Alas, nearly nobody, nearly never proves this!

Many marketing “wisdoms” do not even
stand a proof by an ancient method known as reductio ad absurdum
(“reduction to the absurd”). Many marketing statements can be refuted by a
simple mental or real experiment with Clients.

His contempt for proving things
“scientist” Philip Kotler justifies in a stunning manner: “I remember a remark
of Paul Samuelson, my mentor: ‘It is difficult enough to develop theory than to
take the time to prove it. That work can be done by others’. (!?)” [8]. But
“others” are just happy with that unprovedness – nobody is going to question
their papers and dissertations.

Logic

Real scientific reasoning is impossible
without the strictest of logic.

In academic marketing
– If members of exact sciences were to muddle through the tangle of academic
texts, they would discover that nearly every paragraph of nearly any text
contains some logical flaws.

Whole marketing books may rest on wrong
precepts. For instance, Al Ries and Jack Trout begin their epoch-making opus “22
Immutable Laws of Marketing” by a fantastic logical inference: “There are laws
of nature, so why shouldn’t there be laws of marketing?” (my review of
that book [9].) Sure, in nature there are immutable laws. Well, but that in no
way whatsoever suggests that there must be some rigorous laws in fields of human
endeavor, such as management, philosophy, medicine, embroidery, cabinet making,
ship building, accountancy, wheat growing, or… marketing! One obvious reason is
that human beings are not especially susceptible to laws, even legal laws.

Bruce Marcus has so estimated Kotler’s
logic [10]: “[The book] sees the subject in such distorted ways as to remind me
of Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide. His concept of life included such dicta
as, ‘Are noses not so wonderfully made to fit spectacles’?”

I suspect that many marketing
professors, like Dr. Pangloss, are dead sure that the only raison d’être
of marketing is for them to teach it to make their living.

Mathematics

Laymen, marketing academia included,
believe that physics is just a kind of exercise in applied mathematics. By no
means. Math for physicists is just a possible tool of gaining insights into
Nature’s workings.

It is a
suspicious tool. Some physicists cannot properly apply it and degenerate into
“calculators.” They produce results devoid of physical meaning (“physicality”).
Their math is generally of garbage-in, garbage-out (GIGO) nature. “Garbage-in”
is an incorrectly constructed model (equations); some important factors
overlooked; coefficients, parameters, etc., taken out of thin air; skewed stats,
and so on. GIGO-types in physics have difficulty with “qualitative” problems,
which require no math, such as these (by P. Kapitza) [11]:

Explain why a person can run on very
thin ice but cannot stand on it without falling through.

How can an astronaut return to his
spacecraft if the rope joining him to it accidentally breaks?

Many believe that the father of the
Soviet hydrogen bomb was Andrei Sakharov, a theoretical physicist well versed in
mathematics. But the real creator of the concept of the bomb in 1950 was a
sergeant Oleg Lavrentiev. He was of peasant stock; his unit was stationed at the
Sakhalin [12]; he had just finished extramural high school. His mathematical
proficiency was as good as nil, but his physical thinking was that of a genius.

The GIGO danger makes physicists wary
about mathematics. Daniel Bernoulli went so far as to maintain: “It would be
often better for the true physics if there were no mathematics in the world.”
Albert Einstein regarded himself as a philosopher and disliked mathematics and
numbers in general (he even did not remember the multiplication table). He said:
“So far as the theories of mathematics are about reality, they are not certain;
so far as they are certain, they are not about reality.” Number-crunchers should
take heed of his words: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not
everything that counts can be counted.”

Strictly speaking, physics is no “exact
science.” It is rather a fairly exact science, or approximately exact science,
because physical experiments and calculations never yield absolutely exact
results. Physicists prefer to use the words “estimation,” “approximation,”
“error,” “to within an accuracy of.”

In academic marketing
– Misuse and abuse of mathematics are largely responsible for the current state
of the academe. Academics are mesmerized by fancy math. They try to make every
publication “quantitative,” otherwise refereed journals will not accept them.

Even economists are worried about their
work being mired in math scholasticism. Robert Heilbroner: “Mathematics has
given economics rigor, but alas, also mortis.” Marketing academics have
transferred that rigor mortis to the vibrant craft of marketing.

Unlike
economics and economo-marketing, cliento-marketing deals with people, or rather
with their impressions and decisions. Attempts to work out, using formulas, or
to measure, using quantitative research, anything involving people nearly always
yield meaningless figures. But nobody minds. Even when confronted with pieces of
“mathematics” like these [13]:

“The customer gets benefits and assumes
costs, as shown in this equation:

Based on this equation, the marketer can
increase the value of the customer offering.”

Really? It boggles my mind just to think
of what a poor company would do without that “equation”!

This is how, according to Kotler, a
robot called Linda purchases a computer:

“Like most
buyers (!?), Linda is considering several attributes in her purchase
decision, and she gives each a particular weight. She has assigned 40 percent of
the importance to the computer’s memory capacity, 30 percent to its graphics
capability, 20 percent to its size and weight, and 10 percent to its price
(Linda must be a great computer expert!). To find Linda’s perceived value
for each computer, we (!?) multiply her weights by the scores indicating
her beliefs about each computer’s attributes (Where do we get those funny
scores from?). So for computer A, if she assigns a score of 10 for
memory capacity, 8 for graphics capability, 6 for size and weight, and 4 for
price, the overall score would be:

0.4 (10) + 0.3 (8) + 0.2 (6) + 0.1 (4) =
8

Calculating the scores (Who is to do
that?) for all of the other computers (!?) that Linda is evaluating
would show which one has the highest perceived value. This is critical, because
a manufacturer who knows how buyers evaluate alternatives and form preferences
can take steps to influence buyer decisions.”

That is all that the “farther of
marketing” has to say about the most important and delicate issue in practical
marketing – how a real-life person arrives at his buying decision.
Congratulations!

And please, gentlemen, don’t ask our
guru your irrelevant questions about how the marketer learns the percentages and
scores; where our Linda gets her weights from, etc., etc. In a word, do not
disturb the elegance of that scholastic discourse.

How about
this piece of numbermania [14]:

“… an
empirically based mathematical model that ‘understands’ the connections between
each of the market inputs and outputs in a category. With it you can say, ‘If we
impact this target with this kind of positioning and with this level of
advertising, we can expect to achieve this level of sales.’”

My
goodness! I believe these sorcerers deserve a Nobel prize. Oddly enough, they
appear to have never heard about a strong dependence of advertising efficiency
on the content of the headline, copy, etc.

Information and pseudo-information

Physicists normally go for information
that might suggest some meaningful inferences and decisions. Information that is
collected for its own sake can be referred to as pseudo-information.

In academic marketing
– There are reams of pseudo-informative data. Much of it is produced by
irrelevant and absurd research. Here is a remarkable example – Table 15.2
“Alternative Measures of Awareness” from “Counter-Intuitive Marketing” by Kevin
Clancy and Peter Krieg [14]:

“Have you seen or heard any advertising for a tracer penetration
Barnes & Noble which uses the slogan…?”

Aided Brand

“I’m going to read you a list of booksellers. For each one I name,
please tell me if you’ve ever heard of it. …”

Total brand
awareness

Brand unaided and aided brand awareness

Campaign
penetration

A
weighted composite measure of all of the above, scaled from 0% to
100%

This cumbersome, expensive “research”
will yield a heap of motley, irrelevant “data,” which will then be squeezed into
“a weighted composite measure.” What has that all to do with sales? – Nothing.

By the way, Amazon.com has not
advertised for ages. The funny questions on the right will baffle many. One can
first think of a bookstore round the corner, but it has never advertised. And so
on and so forth.

But what has really much to do with
sales is the question – how do people buy books nowadays? The modern reader
often begins with the Internet. He receives there a lot of information about the
book and makes his buying decision. He may then serf the Net for the lowest
price and best delivery conditions.

Domains of validity

Everything is physics has its domain of
validity. It is critically important to know those domains.

So, the atomic nucleus is described by a
set of theories, each of which being valid for a given range of atomic numbers.
Many laws (e.g., Ohm’s law, Hook’s law) are just convenient approximations: they
only hold up to a certain limit. The breadth of validity domains varies. For
instance, although, strictly speaking, the world is described by Einstein’s
theories, and Newton’s physics is just a special case, it would be insane to
employ Einstein’s equations to design machinery. In other words, Newton’s
practical domain of validity is extremely wide.

By the way, contrary to popular belief, Einstein has not falsified or
disproved Newtonian physics. He just came up with an exotic extension of it.

In academic marketing
– When setting forth concepts and models, academics do not delineate their
validity domains. Marketing texts are rife with facile statements that claim
universality, although in fact they only refer to a specific situation and do
not hold elsewhere. This is dangerous because an inexperienced reader may
translate ideas that concern, say, cosmetics or beer to equipment, construction
materials, etc.

Most texts are devoted to major
“brands.” Respective ideas are only rarely applicable to ho-hum goods and
services. Many high-tech companies employ marketing techniques that are only
suitable for consumer goods. Some advertising precepts solely concern reminding
stuff and are irrelevant to other ad forms.

Ries and Trout called their collection
of exceptions, banalities and downright stupidities “22 Immutable Laws of
Marketing” (my review of that book [9]). This precipitated an “immutabilis”
pandemic. There have already appeared dozens of books of “Immutable Laws” on all
things marketing. The number of “laws” varies from 2 to 22. True, some reviewers
suggested Law # 23 – there is nothing immutable in marketing.

This lack of flexibility results in
rigid dogmatization of concepts of academic marketing, thus rendering them
invalid for real-world marketing.

Research

Physics is 100% research. The
philosophy, ethics, and techniques of research have been refined for centuries.
Its results are of immense importance for society.

In academic marketing
– Most of “research” is an exercise in futility, with business and society
getting noting of it. No wonder that Sony’s Akio Morita, physicist by education,
thus admonished his team: “Carefully watch how people live, get an intuitive
sense as to what they might want and then go with it. Do not do any market
research.” Peter Drucker preached to be cautious with quantitative research.

Whereas in physics many studies are
replicated by other laboratories, “In the marketing literature the replication
rate was 2.6%... Put another way, over 97% of marketing empirical studies is
academic clutter” [2].

Ernest Dichter believed that researchers
lack “creativity in thinking” and ability to interpret the data obtained. David
Ogilvy wrote: “I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing
executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and
they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for
illumination.”

Research firms, of course, recommend all
sorts of surveys, the longer and more expensive the better [14].

Terms and definitions

Descartes said: “Refine the meaning of
words, and you would save humanity from most of its delusions.” Physical “words”
are refined so meticulously that any physicist will give you identical
definitions of “voltage,” “force,” or “neutron capture cross-section.”

In academic marketing
– Academics churn out dozens of terms. Some of them have dozens of definitions.
Academic tomes, even those meant for MBA students, are chock-full with banal
and/or unnecessary definitions, e.g., “satisfaction,” “trend,” “relationship,”
“perception,” “way of life,” “industry,” “market,” “quality.” In addition, there
are dozens of nebulous classifications of the obvious.

Publishing

When a physics sophomore, I began
freelancing for a semiconductor laboratory as a literature reviewer. It was an
exciting experience! Among other things, I was impressed by the logic and
consistency of the development of a topic in physics journals. As a topic
evolved, after replications of course, new hypotheses were generated and tested,
so that in the end it would become a reliable piece of knowledge to be relegated
to R&D people for incorporation into novel products.

I was also impressed by the clarity of
the language of physics texts.

In academic marketing – Academics took over publishing trappings from physics. As to the content of
the stuff, it is often appalling.

Academics compensate for the absence of
real science by unintelligible writing. A funny example of that ugly phenomenon
was described by Scott Armstrong of Wharton [15]: “32 faculty members were asked
to rate the prestige of four passages from management journals. The content of
the passages was held constant while readability was varied. Those passages that
were more difficult to read were rated higher in research competence.” Can you
beat that?

Unlike physics, “each journal and each
conference is just a jumble of bricks with the occasional group cemented
together by a short term research fad, fashion or multi-researcher project” [2].

Academic writings ignore practitioners.
“An article with the title ‘Aspects of Chi Square Testing in Structural Equation
Modeling’ and published in the Journal of Marketing Research would be regarded
as much more valuable… than… ‘How to Make Your Web Site Irresistible’ in the
Marketing Magazine.” [2].

If reviewers of academic stuff were
practitioners, some of it might be of some value for business.

Assessing other’s work

“Love of truth” (L. Feuerbach) in any
science is gauged by the scruples and thoroughness demonstrated by scientists
when assessing their own and other’s work. This takes honesty and integrity.

Unlike academic marketing, physics
conferences are official and unofficial discussions non-stop, far into the
night. Generally, hawk-eyed chairpersons are alert to any deviations from
scientific truth and rigor.

The biologist Jorge E. Allende of Chile
put it in a nutshell: “In evaluating projects, we must forget who are our
friends and enemies, the competitions between Faculties and Universities and
rigorously analyze the project within its scientific context, in its relevance
and in the thoroughness in the approach of the authors. Every praise and
criticism we include in these evaluations should be validly supported” [16].

When there appeared talks about some
“critical marketing,” I hoped that it will concentrate on the basics.
Unfortunately, it just scratches the surface. The convenors of “Critical
Marketing Workshop” [20] mention topics “anchored in theoretical perspectives (poststructuralism,
Marxism, feminism, queer theory, critical theory, postcolonialism, etc.).” Again
hot air!

“The criticism that critical marketing
has little relevance to the “real world concerns” is a recurrent one. We propose
to discuss the possibility (desirability?) of engagement with managerial
practice.” Thank God!

They note that “as critical marketing
becomes more broadly accepted,… perhaps it runs the risk of losing its mordant
edge.” I believe it has already lost it, if it ever had it.

Rigor

I put that issue last because it
incorporates most of what has been discussed above. Says Allende: “Rigor is an
attitude that contrasts with the weaknesses of human nature, the acceptance of
inexact methods, the adoption of groundless conclusions, accepting the
predominant opinion despite the lack of data which sustain it.”

In academic marketing
– Academia like to harangue about rigor, but they have a vague idea of what it
means in real science. Their rigor is pseudo-rigor; it is in essence rigor
mortis, mortification of marketing.

It is a huge scandal

According to some estimates, marketing
academic industry, with journals and all, is worth $1.5 billion. It seems to be
blithely unaware that it is socially meaningless: most academics produce
disastrous marketing graduates, do irrelevant research, and publish papers only
read by other academia, but… nobody commits hara-kiri, and only a couple of
Donquijotic characters make a ripple [2, 3, 4].

Peter Drucker said: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be
done at all.” I think he meant marketing academics.

I would hate to think that the entire
academic marketing community is a crowd of irresponsible morons. But why do they
tolerate all that morass? If academics really want to be of some value to
business and society, they need a Perestoika-style revolutionary change.

Why was Perestroika in the USSR
so successful? One of the reasons was that people were sick and tired of duplicity
and hypocrisy that permeated the entire Soviet life. Hapless Soviet students had
to learn stilted Marxist dogmas that had nothing to do with the real world out
there – not unlike the dogmas of academic marketing. Quo vadis?

Physics vs. cliento-marketing

If acquainted with the work of the best
practical marketers, a physicist would find a lot of exciting parallels between
physics and practical marketing.

As a physicist-turned-marketer myself, I
cannot help thinking of how the multidisciplinary and fuzzy domain of marketing
could benefit from physical thinking and those parallels.

Phenomenology and micro-level

Physicists practice both
phenomenological approaches and micro-level approaches, the former being rooted
in the latter. For example, when a physicist measures or calculates an electric
current, he deals with phenomenology; when he considers things at the level of
charge carriers, he takes a micro-level look at the situation. For nuclear
scientists, the micro-level is that of nuclei; for chemists – that of electrons,
atoms, and molecules. The micro-level picture suggests valuable insights and
possibilities to control processes.

A counterpart of micro-level in
practical marketing is the Client: dozens of questions about the way he arrives
at his buying decision and what influences that.

The Client is the weakest element of
academic marketing (remember the robotic Linda?). Most academics start with
phenomenology, from slightly marketinized economics. It is disastrous. It is
like attempting to build an edifice without a basement.

In cliento-marketing the Client is the key. Client insights enable a cliento-marketer
to work out effective product-selling information and plan the selling approach.
When through with his “micro-level,” a cliento-marketer can shift to some
phenomenology, e.g., target audiences, “Business Development,” etc. At some
level of his analysis he may even venture into neighboring domains of economics.

Measurements

Measurements in marketing resemble those
in quantum mechanics, where objects are so delicate that the very act of
measurement destroys them. Precisely this happens when market researchers
crudely probe into delicate motivations of the Client to get just “truthful
lies.” Cliento-marketers seek undistorted results using delicate tools, such as
observation of shoppers’ behavior or “naïve listening.”

“Combinations of opposites”

Aristotle said that “harmony is a
blending and combination of opposites.” In physics, a striking manifestation of
this combination is radiation – it is waves and particles at the same time. In
cliento-marketing, we can talk about the harmony of the rational and the
emotional in everything.

Our brain has two hemispheres. The left
one is said to be responsible for logic and speech; the right one, for
imagination and intuition. Modern physics has become so brain-raking that it
needs “two-brainers” like Leonardo da Vinci.

Einstein, a good violinist himself,
maintained that “the greatest scientists are always artists as well,” stressing
that fantasy and intuition had been more important to him than knowledge. Robert
Oppenheimer: “Both the man of science and the man of art have always had to deal
with the harmonization of what is new with what is familiar.” I admire Niels
Bohr’s remark: “No, no, you’re not thinking, you’re just being logical.”

Unlike academic marketing, but like
physics, cliento-marketing calls for two-brain thinking in a big way. Ogilvy
said of launching a new brand: “That is not work for beginners. It calls for
vivid imagination, tempered by marketing acumen; an ability to peer into the
future… I doubt whether there are more than a dozen people in the United States
who are qualified by temperament and experience to perform such an operation.”

Cliento-marketing is not anybody’s
business!

Creativity and “imagination in a
straitjacket”

Another Einstein’s wisdom: “The true
sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” Physics is a creative
narcotic. I feel nostalgic sometimes about waves of euphoria that would engulf
you, when after many desperate days and nights, things click into order. I kind
of re-lived those moments when I was reading books by Claude Hopkins. He so
described the way he would normally arrive at a world-shaking decision: “Night
after night I paced Lincoln Park, trying to evolve a plan. I held to my old
conceptions. Serve better than others, offer more than others, and you are
pretty sure to win. One morning I came to the office and said: ‘I have the
winning idea’.”

Cliento-marketing is about winning
ideas. It is a creative craft of making unique decisions fine-tuned to a given
case.

Any creativity begins with imagination,
disciplined imagination. James Gleick writes about Feynman [21]: “For Feynman
the essence of scientific imagination was a powerful and almost painful rule.
What scientists create must match reality. It must match what is already known.
Scientific creativity, he said, is imagination in a straitjacket.”

His words are echoed by the outstanding
cliento-marketer Theodore Levitt in his book “Marketing Imagination”: “To
exercise the imagination is to be creative… It is distinguished from other forms
of imagination by the unique insights it brings to understanding customers,
their problems and the means to capture their attention and their customs.”

It is imagination that prompts to a
creative marketer answers to productive “Client” questions: how the Client
lives; what his problems are; how he buys and uses the product; what language he
understands; what he knows about a given technology; whether a purchase is
simple or complex. And so on and so forth.

Unfortunately, academic (pseudo)marketing
has been killing creativity since the 1960s. The first edition (1967) of
Kotler’s tome carried a chapter on “Marketing creativity,” but then Kotler
quietly removed it. The British marketer Nigel Piercy in his “Market-Led
Strategic Change” [22] comes up with an explanation: “My suspicion is that the
reason is simple – lecturers and professors using the textbook did not want it
to remain, because they want to teach theory, structure and systems, not
creativity.”

Piercy is right: Kotler’s clients are
not students, not businessmen, not society. His darling clients are marketing
professors – they supply to him thousands of student leads for his prosperous
publishing business.

Piercy inquires: “When did we forget
about creativity in marketing?” Well, perhaps it is time to recall about
creativity? What do you think, gentlemen?

Intuition

Again Einstein “The only real valuable
thing is intuition.” Not only in physics. Robert Bernstein, president of Random
House, when interviewing MBA graduates, said: “Only intuition can protect you
from the most dangerous of all, the articulate incompetent.” Lee Iacocca
appealed to managers fresh from the information-crazy Harvard to trust their
gut.

Physical thinking vs. marketing thinking

At the very first lecture on physics we
were told, much to our surprise, that memory and knowledge were not the most
important tools for a modern physicist. We were recommended to develop, with the
help of our mentors, refined physical thinking (one professor called that
“physical intelligencia-ness”). Some examiners would allow students to
prepare for an exam in the library, or use whatever literature. Anyway some
would fail the exam, for they were tested not so much for knowledge, but rather
for their thinking.

Years of experience in practical marketing have shown to me that the ways a
physicist and a cliento-marketer progress to their decisions have much in
common.

Both rely on a fusion of logic with
imagination and intuition. Both require creativity and inventiveness. Both
require responsibility and integrity.

One difference of marketing thinking is that its object is the human being
(the Client), and so a cliento-marketer should be able not only to think
for the Client, but also to feel for the Client. (R. Feynman: “Imagine
how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings!”) Cliento-marketing is
sometimes more fun and challenge than physics.

I have laid down the essence of what I
view as proper marketing thinking and ways it can be employed as a
down-to-earth tool in my book “Marketing Thinking, or Clientomania.” [23]. I
have drastically reworked the text for the second edition. I can send its
electronic version for comments. It is basically what I teach and use in my
consulting work.

Russian Nobel prize laureate Lev Landau
held that what makes a physicist is not the text-book, but rather the book of
problems. It develops thinking.

At the moment, time permitting, I am
working on a book of “problems” in marketing and advertising. I invite any
cooperation.